A Sweet Tooth for Wrigley's Stock Price

I made my first trade today, submitting an after-hours market price buy request for 1,478 shares of William Wrigley Jr. Co. (WWY), which last traded at about $67.72. (By the way, I am using Stocktrak for my virtual Million Dollar Portfolio analysis.) This would give me approximately $99,967.36 of an equity position in Wrigley's. I like to try and hold each equity position as close to $100,000 as possible. This way, I can look down my list of equities and know quickly what my unrealized gain/loss is in each position. This may not hold true for my short positions, which I will explain further in another post.

I had last analyzed Wrigley's in my post on my Six Stocks for 2006.
Here are some more web references which support my optimistic view on Wrigley's:

Forbes.com recently ranked Wrigley's among "The 400 Best Big Companies". They have been on the list for the past 8 years.

Nathan Parmelee over at The Motley Fool discusses the "traits that have made Starbucks, United Technologies and Wrigley fantastic winners over the past 10 years."

BusinessWeek online featured an article describing Standard & Poor's "PowerPicks Portfolio 2006". Stephen Biggar and Robert Gold stated:

• "We believe that the recently acquired Kraft confectionary brands -- which include Altoids and Lifesavers -- will contribute to strong top and bottom line growth in 2006 and beyond. We believe the shares are attractive given our view of the company's relatively high and improving operating profitability, strong balance sheet, dominant and growing market share, and impressive global distribution infrastructure."

Finally, I must reference again Wrigley's amazing long term performance charts. Over at the Wrigley's website, there are some great investor tools, including an Investment Calculator. Here you can see that $10,000 invested on January 5, 1970 in Wrigley's stock would today be worth $910,026.17, for a total cumulative return of 9,000.26%!